qBittorrent 4.2.0 Adds Support For Libtorrent 1.2, New Features

qBittorrent 4.2.0 was released recently featuring support for libtorrent 1.2, some minor new features, as well as WebUI updates.

qBittorrent is a free and open source BitTorrent client for Windows, macOS, OS/2, Linux and FreeBSD, written in C++ (Qt) and Python (for its optional search engine). It comes with a Qt GUI, but it can also be used on a headless server, without requiring the X window system -- in both GUI and headless mode you can remote control it through its web user interface.

The application comes with pretty much everything you'd need in a BitTorrent client, from sequential downloading and bandwidth scheduling to a torrent creation tool, anonymous mode, integrated search engine, RSS feed reader and downloader with advanced filters, IP filtering, and of course support for DHT, PeX, encrypted connections, LSD, UPnP and NAT-PMP port forwarding support, µTP, magnet links, private torrents and more.

The biggest change in the latest qBittorrent 4.2.0 is the added support for libtorrent 1.2.x (and has dropped support for libtorrent < 1.1.10). libtorrent 1.2 comes with some significant API updates -- the most important for users being that it saves fastresumes differently, which has the consequence of rechecking all torrents if you downgrade qBittorrent 4.2.0 to an earlier version (which still uses libtorrent 1.1.x). For developers there's a page that explains the changes encountered when upgrading to libtorrent 1.2. You can also see a list of changes in libtorrent 1.2.

qBittorrent 4.2.0 WebUI and its new Advanced settings

Besides this, qBittorrent includes a large number of minor new features and improvements:

Use PBKDF2 for the GUI lock and WebUI. You will need to set your password again
Add "Remove torrent and its files" option to share ratio limiting
Add "Preview file" double-click action
Allow setting larger checking memory usage in GUI
Add option to align file to piece boundary when creating new torrent
Converted remaining icons to svg
The OpenSSL and zlib version have been added to the About dialog and stackdump
Log performance alerts from libtorrent
Use native folder icon in content tree
Added "Socket backlog size" and "File pool size" (sets the upper limit on the total number of files this session will keep open) to the Advanced options
Add Availability column
Allow styling with QSS stylesheets
Use a randomized port number for the first run
Enable Super Seeding mode once ratio/time limit is reached
Allow to select multiple entries in "banned IP" dialog
Reallow to pause checking torrents and to force recheck torrents that aren't fully started
Fix: Avoid performance penalty when logger is full
Fix speed limit not applying to IPv6 peers
WebUI:

Add WebUI support for triggering context menus on mobile
Add support for tags in the WebUI
Use Javascript strict mode
Update WebUI img to use svg images
Add ability to add and ban a peer from the Web UI
Allow WebUI Content tab to be sorted
Allow WebUI Trackers table to be manipulated
Add autocomplete attribute to WebUI
Remove max character limit of location path
Display files hierarchically in Web UI content tab
Register protocol handler in WebUI for magnet links
Add advanced options in WebUI (these are the settings used by libtorrent)

See the complete changelog

Also, with this release qBittorrent has dropped support for Windows versions older than Windows 7, and for macOS older than 10.10.

In case you've missed it, also check out the latest Deluge 2.0 BitTorrent client.

Download qBittorrent

The qBittorrent downloads page has binaries for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and there's also the source available for download.

On Linux, scroll down to the bottom of the qBittorrent downloads page, choose Linux from the operating system dropdown, then choose your Linux distribution. For most Linux distributions though, you'll find a link to the official package available in your Linux distribution repositories, which is not updated to the latest version in most cases (Arch Linux being an exception - the latest qBittorrent 4.2.0 is already in the Arch repositories).

Related: VLC BitTorrent Plugin Streams Video Torrents Without Waiting For The Complete Download

On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and other Ubuntu-based Linux distributions have the options of installing the latest qBittorrent release by using its official stable PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:qbittorrent-team/qbittorrent-stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install qbittorrent

For any Linux distribution: you also have the option of installing qBittorrent from Flathub (which was already updated with the latest version), which should work on most Linux distributions. If you don't have Flatpak installed and the Flathub repository enabled on your system, see the instructions for how to do this on the Flathub quick setup page. You only need to setup Flatpak and Flathub once.

After setting up Flatpak and Flathub, go to the qBittorrent Flahub page and click the install button. If you're on GNOME / you have a software store (like GNOME Software) that supports Flatpak applications, you can search for qBittorrent and install it from there. Or install it from Flathub using this command:

flatpak install flathub org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent

On Linux Mint, which has Flatpak and Flathub enabled by default, all you have to do is search for the application in Software Manager and install it from there (it should say "(Flathub)" after the app name).